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We got a little bit of snow last night. Carroll County did its usual horrible job with the roads, which made Saturday morning errands a little hair-raising ... and incomplete, when we hit an untouched road and decided not to chance it in our small, decidedly not-made-for-snow vehicle.
Because of the snow, though, Bobby wanted to go snowboarding. He's always wanted to learn snowboarding and even purchased the equipment a few years ago before my employment situation, followed by my student teaching internship, thrust us into penury. This year, he purchased a night club pass, which gives him unlimited use of Liberty Mountain after 4 PM. (As of today, the pass has paid for itself, so it was definitely a good purchase.)
I went with him today, to sit in the lodge and drink hot beverages and play on my computer and read frivolous novels. I wasn't getting a good wi-fi signal, so I started looking through old and unfinished stories stored on Pengolodh the Laptop.
Back in 2007, I participated in NaNoWriMo. I didn't enjoy working on the story, though, even though I went into the project with passion for the world and its characters; working on the story actually made me lose that passion ... not good. I didn't feel like the story was good at all. After NaNo, I never touched it again. It was a bad time in my life; I was still with the WAU, working out of the Baltimore office, doing passive-aggressive things like wearing intentionally mismatched clothes to work and wrapping the lei I was given for Employee Appreciation Week around the miniature tombstone that I keep on my desk. (That's still there, lei in place ... my students love the story of why I have a tombstone with a lei wrapped around it on my desk!) I wasn't at my nadir yet, but I was quickly sliding toward it. I think that's probably why the story was, I thought, unsuccessful.
I'd all but forgotten about the story. Tonight, I found it on my computer and thought, "What the hell ... the worst that happens is it's so awful that I don't finish reading it." I'd written 85 pages, so it was pretty long, though still far from finished.
But when I started reading it, I actually ... liked it. A lot. I felt that old passion for the world I'd crafted (not my usual o-fic "Midhavens 'verse") flame anew. I was worried that I'd forget how I'd planned the story to go, since I almost never write these things down and have zero memory for plotlines, but as I read, these details came back to me.
I find myself suddenly and inexplicably excited about this story. I probably won't be able to work on it for a while--I start back to school in two weeks and B2MeM is nigh--but I can play with the characters in my head in the meantime ... and I haven't had characters in my head for so long that dust in my head makes the backs of my eyes itch. And I feel like things have come full circle: from the point where I knew that the job and path in life I'd settled for wasn't something I could tolerate for much longer, to the point where I do feel like my feet have found a road they are content to travel.
Because of the snow, though, Bobby wanted to go snowboarding. He's always wanted to learn snowboarding and even purchased the equipment a few years ago before my employment situation, followed by my student teaching internship, thrust us into penury. This year, he purchased a night club pass, which gives him unlimited use of Liberty Mountain after 4 PM. (As of today, the pass has paid for itself, so it was definitely a good purchase.)
I went with him today, to sit in the lodge and drink hot beverages and play on my computer and read frivolous novels. I wasn't getting a good wi-fi signal, so I started looking through old and unfinished stories stored on Pengolodh the Laptop.
Back in 2007, I participated in NaNoWriMo. I didn't enjoy working on the story, though, even though I went into the project with passion for the world and its characters; working on the story actually made me lose that passion ... not good. I didn't feel like the story was good at all. After NaNo, I never touched it again. It was a bad time in my life; I was still with the WAU, working out of the Baltimore office, doing passive-aggressive things like wearing intentionally mismatched clothes to work and wrapping the lei I was given for Employee Appreciation Week around the miniature tombstone that I keep on my desk. (That's still there, lei in place ... my students love the story of why I have a tombstone with a lei wrapped around it on my desk!) I wasn't at my nadir yet, but I was quickly sliding toward it. I think that's probably why the story was, I thought, unsuccessful.
I'd all but forgotten about the story. Tonight, I found it on my computer and thought, "What the hell ... the worst that happens is it's so awful that I don't finish reading it." I'd written 85 pages, so it was pretty long, though still far from finished.
But when I started reading it, I actually ... liked it. A lot. I felt that old passion for the world I'd crafted (not my usual o-fic "Midhavens 'verse") flame anew. I was worried that I'd forget how I'd planned the story to go, since I almost never write these things down and have zero memory for plotlines, but as I read, these details came back to me.
I find myself suddenly and inexplicably excited about this story. I probably won't be able to work on it for a while--I start back to school in two weeks and B2MeM is nigh--but I can play with the characters in my head in the meantime ... and I haven't had characters in my head for so long that dust in my head makes the backs of my eyes itch. And I feel like things have come full circle: from the point where I knew that the job and path in life I'd settled for wasn't something I could tolerate for much longer, to the point where I do feel like my feet have found a road they are content to travel.
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